51 CONTENT MARKETING HACKS CHAPTER 2 Nestle Toll House Cookies: Old School Content Marketing in Action March 16, 2012 I want to tell you a quick story that should inspire you to use content marketing to sell your product. Do you know how chocolate chip cookies were invented? According to Nestle, Mrs. Wakefield (owner of the Toll House Inn) was making chocolate cookies one day, but ran out of regular baker’s chocolate. She didn’t know what to do until she came up with the idea to substitute it with broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate. She thought it would melt and mix into the batter, but it didn’t, and that’s how the chocolate chip cookie was born. What does that have to do with content marketing? Nothing, at least at this part of the story. But what happened next matters to us as content marketers… Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestle in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips (instead of patenting it and making billions!) And what genius thing did Nestle choose to do with that recipe? Simple. On every bag of Nestle chocolate chips sold in North America ever since, they included a variation of her original recipe printed on the back. They didn’t sell the recipe. They didn’t lock it away in a safe for only a few to see it. They gave it away… on the back of every bag of chocolate chips they sold. And what did those people with the chocolate chip cookie recipe need? Chocolate chips. What happened when friends ate these cookies and asked where the recipe come from? They were told to go buy a bag of Nestle’s chocolate chips. (That made ©2015 Scott Aughtmon #51contentmarketinghacks 17